Updates: 2008

Two generations ago, American policymakers and scholars developed a U.S. national security strategy that offered a lasting and coherent response to the threats that emerged after World War II. In the late 1940s George F. Kennan, then a diplomat serving in Moscow, developed the strategy of containment. This strategy became the cornerstone of America’s successful effort to address the threat of Soviet expansion.

The Tobin Project asks for grant proposals from scholars who intend to undertake new, policy-relevant research that will contribute to knowledge of regulatory governance and the appropriate role of the state and markets in economic regulation. Potential research topics may address four over-arching themes: models of economic and political behavior; strategies for assessing regulatory outcomes; information flows and regulatory politics; and regulatory strategy and design.

At an inaugural meeting of the Economic Inequality working group, scholars identify a number of domains for research, each of which offers a promising setting for promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration and highlighting important research questions. While the scholars agree that inequality has been reasonably well-measured, they also note that research on the causes of increased inequality has produced little consensus and that there is markedly little work on the consequences of and remedies for inequality.